B2B Marketing Strategy: How to Create?

While it might seem that B2B and B2C marketing strategies have a lot in common, in fact, there are a lot of aspects that differentiate them. The most significant difference is that B2B companies are focused on long term relationships with their client, and B2C brands use quick solutions and expect immediate effects. Moreover, the audience and way of communication with customers are strongly diverse. To find out how to develop a marketing strategy for your B2B company, check out our article.

Define the unique value proposition

Start with placing your company among your brand’s competitors. Find your products or services advantages and write them down. Based on that, create a unique value proposition – the short statement that expresses the most significant and particular benefits your company can provide to its customers. This should be the core of your strategy. Keep your company’s unique value proposition while creating every content. You can’t play that card all the time, but at the end of the day, this is what can attract your prospects. B2B customers are benefits-orientated, so your marketing messages have to be less emotional, and more straightforward.

Identify your audience

You probably have a buyer’s persona. You know who are your clients, you’re familiar with the demographics, and industries they’re working in. Now, create marketing personas to know how to communicate with your potential clients. Go through the customer’s journey to find pain-points and figure out how you can make this process easier and more intuitive. Talk to a few existing customers to learn about their opinions and impressions during every step of their journey. Identify which social media channels your target group is using and do they read newsletters. On top of that, find out how the purchasing process occurs in their companies – who is a decision-maker? Now, you should know who is in an actual target group of your future B2b marketing strategy.

Set goals and KPIs of your B2B marketing strategy

As every business aspect, your B2B marketing strategy should be goal-orientated. Cooperate with your sales team to create coherent marketing goals that will eventually result in increased sales. Your goals should be high-level (you’ll get into details in the implementation of the strategy) and laid out on a timeline. Moreover, you need to find a way to measure your brand’s marketing performance. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can refer, for example, to return on investment (ROI), lead generation, intent to purchase, engagement. KPIs can help you specify your goals and figure out how to achieve them.

Choose the tactics you’ll use

Depending on your goals and your target group preferences you should select the most appropriate tactics and channels of communication to reach your audience. First of all, revamp your website, add unique value propositions and improve UX. You can also create dedicated landing pages to use in your marketing activities. That way, you can personalize the experience and run more effective campaigns, as the content of a given landing page can suits a viewer more accurately than your general home page.

Consider these tactics:

• social media marketing
• e-mail marketing
• content marketing
• video marketing (including webinars)
• remarketing
• outreach email marketing
• cold email
• PPC campaigns
• event marketing
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• affiliate marketing

There’s no need to use every existing B2B marketing tactic, focus on these ones, which can be the most beneficial fo your company. Nevertheless, SEO and content marketing seems like must-have tactics for every business nowadays. At this stage of creating your B2B SaaS content marketing and SEO strategy, you should also decide which social media platforms you want to use for promoting your business.

While choosing tactics, keep in mind your company’s sales funnel, so that your customers’ experience is consistent.

Find benchmarks

No matter which tactics you’ll choose, you need to research your competitors and other companies that achieve success. Look for inspirations to specify which type of content you’d like to create. Figure out which style of communication and tone will be appropriate to use while interacting with your target group. Remember that even if your targets are companies, you’re communicating with their representatives.

Select smart tools to execute your B2B marketing strategy

Once you know which tactics you’ll use in your B2B marketing, you can look for tools that will help you achieve your goals easier and faster. The market is filled with marketing solutions, but you don’t need them all. Invest in software that’s actually useful to you and your team. Most of the tools offer free trials so that you can find out on your own if they’re effective. Choose solutions that enable integration, so that you can use the data gathered, for example, in your customer relationship management system (which itself might be a free CRM) in other tools, like e-mail marketing system. While comparing solutions, check out how many useful features they have. Or maybe they have even options, that you didn’t know you always needed? For example, RocketLink is not only a URL shortener. Thanks to RocketLink you can also add retargeting pixels, CTAs and much more!

Conclusions

When you’re armed with the set of right tools, you can implement your strategy. Create valuable content, don’t be pushy and highlight the most essential advantages of your products or services. Respect your customers’ time and go straight to the point showing the benefits.

We hope that this short guide can help you craft a B2B marketing strategy for your company. Keep in mind, that you can always change some aspects of the strategy, in order to optimize your efforts. Analyze your marketing performance regularly, try out new tactics, messages, and run A/B tests. You should constantly strive to improve your content and run precisely targeted campaigns to meet your customers’ expectations.